Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture with a focus on ArchiMate

ArchiMate + PlantUML = Sequence Diagram Joy

I’ve always had a love of sequence diagrams, for those that don’t know what a sequence diagram is, this may not be the blog for you! Sequence diagrams have always struck me as one of the more useful, and practical design documents to use to describe how a system works.

ArchiMate, of course, works on a slightly larger level, but I think great things can happen when you combine the two, and have used many diagrams to help describe some of the more intricate detail within an architecture.

There are many tools which can be used to create sequence diagrams, but, as I am a nerd, and enjoy over-complicating things, PlantUML floats my boat in many ways, mainly because it still feels like a fun techie tool (and works well with Markdown too!).

PlantUML is a tool which allows you to quickly create UML diagrams based on a (fairly) simple text syntax. It supports many types of diagram, including Sequence Diagrams and basic ArchiMate. As PlantUML supports both of these diagrams, I have written a support library which can be included in any PlantUML diagram to define each of the ArchiMate concepts and include them within a sequence diagram.

Example Diagram Source

Support Library

Next steps… figure out how I can write a jArchi script to write my PlantUML for me!

Published by smileham

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I also often use PlantUML and find it useful to work directly from Archi and don’t rely on a browser. For this purpose, I have a really small script containing only: Browser.open(“https://www.planttext.com/”, “PlantUML”)

This opens a new tab in Archi with PlantText. Once you’ve created your sequence diagram, you can simply drag’n drop it to another tab containing a canvas and the image will be created in it.